#x98;A#x9C; factious people politics and society in colonial New York

"Patricia U. Bonomi's excursion into our eighteenth-century past gives us a good look at what we were like then and knocks off a few tightly held ideas along the way. If some of her people—the Morrises, the Livingstons, the Coldens—were living today, they would feel right at home in the shifty quagmires of contemporary politics."—New York Timesfront piece :The heterogeneous and discordant character of the present-day state of New York is not the product of modern times that it may seem. Dur¬ ing its earliest days as a colony, New York was buffeted by political and sectional rivalries and by the conflict which arises from a wide diversity of ethnic and religious identities, a New York characteristic already established by the late seventeenth century. “A divided, contentious impoverished people I find them . . . neither party will be satisfied with less than the necks of their adversaries.” So declared Governor Fletcher on his arrival in New York in 1692.In the first general reassessment of colonial New York in more than sixty years, Patricia Bonomi surveys that pivotal colony from the late seven¬ teenth century until about 1770 and the beginning of the Revolutionary crisis. While the principal focus is on politics, the book has much to say about the social, economic, cultural, and geographic setting within which early New York politics evolved. "Patricia U. Bonomi's excursion into our eighteenth-century past gives us a good look at what we were like then and knocks off a few tightly held ideas along the way. If some of her people—the Morrises, the Livingstons, the Coldens—were living today, they would feel right at home in the shifty quagmires of contemporary politics."—__New York Times__ xv 342p blue cloth fresh, first edition, this copy with some annotations in pencil (a few in pen), also a few notes to endpaper in back, a well preserved, pre-studied copy [by] Patricia U. Bonomi. Bibliography: P. [317]-330.